Setting Up a Software Development Environment on Alpine Linux

The images get even smaller after Bionic!

Not sure why the obsession with OS size. I don't mind having a 1GB OS that has really good functionality vs a 50MB one that has none. I do want size to be a factor for server based images which is a different beast altogether.

They did some rearranging. Trusty was 188MB, Bionic is 88MB

Ubuntu has 29MB micro image also https://blog.ubuntu.com/2018/07/09/minimal-ubuntu-released

Like emulating x86 on iOS[1], for example?

[1]: https://github.com/tbodt/ish

It's a simple, elegant system that does what I need. And needing so little resources really makes a difference even when you have a more powerful machine.

Agree— the justification given in the article is needing the environment set up in order to port some software to it, but you don't need a development environment for that, only a build environment. Using containers or even just a chroot (https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Installing_Alpine_Linux_in...) would be far more straight forward.

Now, if you want to try native Alpine as your desktop just for the fun of it, that's fine, but it's going to be a pretty constrained environment, and may not have been worth the several hours it took to get it going.

People believe that security is like salt. Just sprinkle it on top and it somehow makes the whole thing better.

Aren’t minimalist operating systems often meant to run as guests under more complicated virtualization layers? Limited driver support, for example, can be an important part of the minimalism.

> I'd be interested to hear what the Alpine maintainers think of their biggest user...

The creator of Alpine Linux, Natanael Copa, reportedly went to work for Docker, so presumably Natanael thinks it's a reasonable use-case. Solomon Hykes, Docker's CTO at the time, posted about it on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11000827

Alpine Linux, as I understand it, strives to be a lightweight and minimalist distribution of Linux. That's exactly what you'd want to run as a container, assuming you are going to run a Linux distribution and one that's different than the production host system.

out of curiousity, where you say Docker is "insecure" what specific aspects of Docker were you thinking of?

It could be fair to call the docker ecosystem bloated and insecure, but I would argue that a single (Alpine based) docker container is a secure, simple, and elegant solution.

Docker is vastly over complicated? It’s one file jotting down a setup, and two commands, build and run and your up and going. How could it possibly be simpler? Bloated? It takes up almost no space and the docker image containers in large part thanks to alpine run less than 50MiB unless you are using huge dependencies at which point there is no way around it anyway. As for insecure, what’s the issue? We’re running untrusted code in containers and have had no issues but I’d love to hear where the model breaks down.

Void (Linux) has glibc and musl flavors.

Debian?

For upthread comparison, the debian:stable-slim container is 22MB.

That includes perl, tzdata, apt, bash, coreutils/util-linux and... basically nothing else. It's a very minimal rootfs that can still be easily extended. (The standalone perl docker image is over 300MB.)

Pardon my ignorance, but what's the nature of these musl-related issues? Is it because some programs or libraries use glibc specific-features/bugs? Or is it something else? Does glibc have their own non-standard functions?

I don't claim to be an expert, but my understanding is that Alpine is mainly focused on small size, so musl libc, lack of systemd, etc, are means to that end.

Void seems to be more focused on power user experience, in the vein of Gentoo / Arch. So glibc or musl as an option, lack of systemd, and a pacman-like package manager (xbps) are all means to that end.

Alpine gets lots of usage as a Docker base layer due to that small size. Void certainly could be used as a Docker base image, but that's much less common than Alpine because the image sizes are probably roughly comparable to Debian and when running in a container the systemd vs not-systemd choice becomes less relevant.

Void: Rolling release, musl and glibc variants.

Alpine: Stable releases that are supported 2 years, musl-only. EDIT: Oops, forgot that "edge" is a rolling release.

I personally prefer Void for desktop and Alpine for servers/containers/appliances, but either could be used for either.

"DevOps is the combination of cultural philosophies, practices, and tools that increases an organization’s ability to deliver applications and services at high velocity: evolving and improving products at a faster pace than organizations using traditional software development and infrastructure management processes. This speed enables organizations to better serve their customers and compete more effectively in the market."

From AWS's What is Devops? https://aws.amazon.com/devops/what-is-devops/

If you're a low-level employee, it means someone who hooks up Jenkins to other crap. If you're a manager, it's a position you're hiring for. If you're upper management or executive, it's a methodology to solve business problems and improve output. If you're C-level, it's a cool buzz word.

System and network administration as a software development target.

About $150k a year.

Yes mostly, but it might also be considered a very roundabout evergreen recruiting advertisement, "Oh look they are using X and Y to build Z! I bet that would be a cool place to work if the opportunity arose."

More like try and attract potential employees by seeming cool and working on interesting problems

More posts -> more backlinks -> higher domain authority -> higher search result ranking in search engines